124 THE. W A YW AR.D PR.E.55 Holy Wars in this way; it provides the virtue of balance, although if you read both sides you cannot tell what happened. This is normal; I have never seen a second impelled to tell the ref- eree about a foul committed by his principal-let the so-and-so catch the other guy. And oI?-e must take care of oneself even more carefully when, as in a Holy War, there is no referee a t all N EwsPAPERMEN, like practitioners of any other trade, are aided by precedent. I once knew a World man, of the vintage of about 1910, who used to speak of "coasting" editors-fellows who could get along all fight as long as they had a few famil- iar landfalls to guide them, like "Blonde Mourns Man She Shot," "Ragged Recluse Leaves a Million," "Bryan Says He Won't Run Again." The latest flare-up with Moscow began on lInes that have become equally traditional since 1946, when the Cold War began: we make a true charge and the Soviets deny It, or the SovIets make an untrue charge and we deny it A copyreader hardly needed to interrupt his game of chess to write an appropriate headline, like the Mirror's of Friday, May 6th, REDS DOWN U.S. PLA. E; PILOT BLA.CKOlTT SEEN IN CAPITA.L THE COAST R.ECEDES aircraft which had drifted Into Soviet air space, probably because its pilot became unconscious when his oxygen equipment failed. . . . Khrushchev has revealed him- self and his beastly character to the full; he is a pig in human form. The Wall Street Journal on the same day said: CRAFT PROBABLY SOUGHT WEATHER DATA, WAS TAKEN FOR SPY, OFFI- CIALS SAY PRIv \. TEL Y T HE story of the plane that Mr. Khrushchev said was shot down by a rocket went off course on Saturday afternoon, May 7th, and the shoreline dropped below the horizon, leaving editors and columnists, like so many Columbuses, out at sea with no prec- edent to steer by. It was on that day that Khrushchev, speaking before the Supreme Soviet, announced that Fran- cis G. Powers, the American pilot, was both "alive and kicking" and a prisoner, ha ving been picked up thirteen hundred miles inside the Soviet fron tier--along with all hIs charts and photographs and collection of cloak-and-dagger properties-and that the pilot had talked. (F rom dispatches published since, It appears he carried the most complete outfit of identification papers in the records of espionage. He even had a card authorizing him to buy chocolate bars in the PX.) Simultaneously, or just about, according to United Press In- ternational, "the United States admitted. . . that the Ameri- can plane shot down in RussIa last Sunday 'probably' was on an intelligence mission 'to ob- tain information now concealed behind the Iron Curtain.'" The nevvS service added, "But, in a statement approved b} President Eisenhower, the State Departmen t denied Soviet Premier Khrushchev's charge that the flight was authorIzed by officIals in Washington. The statement contained absolutely nothIng to contradict Khru- shchev's charge that the un- armed U -2 observatIon plane, piloted by Francis G. Powers, a civilian, had flo\vn 1,300 miles into Russia to spy on that coun- try. Instead, the statement left the impression that the report on the incident furnished to the State Department and the V\Thite House by the National Aeronautics and Space Admin- (Officials always say "privatel)" to the Journal what they say publicly to the other papers; this gives it the air of be- ing in the know.) Everybody else followed the same line. It has be- come a badge of loyalty to accept the official version of such episodes; I can- not remember when any New York paper, since the demise, unlamented, of the Dazly Worker in 195B, has ever hinted that an American defend- an t in an espionage trial behind the Iron CurtaIn might be guilty. (The Worker, of course, never admitted that he might not be.) The emphasis was always on the unfairness of the trial, as if in a country with an inferior judiciary system there could be no crime as charged. Moslems and Christians, in theIr separate chronicles, reported the over an Associated Press weather story with which you are probably by now familiar, and an editorialist could smack out a leader without losing much time from handicapping the fourth race at Aqueduct, as, for example, from the Mirror of May 7th: THE WORD Is 'MURDER' Premier Khrushchev personally ordered the rocket-destruction of an unarmed U.S. w , ,! L" \ "." .\ ',. , ." ,.-. -'. I' l W f